Many historical accounts have asserted that containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. We are the first to suggest an identification strategy for estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade. Our empirical strategy exploits time and cross-sectional variation in countries' first adoption of container facilities and combines it with product-level variation in containerizability and container usage. Applying our container variables on a large panel of product level trade flows for the period 1962-1990, our estimates suggest economically large concurrent and cumulative effects of containerization and lend support for the view of containerization being a driver of 20 th century economic globalization.JEL classification: F13

We exploitJapan's sudden and complete opening up to international trade in the 1860s to test the empirical validity of one of the oldest and most fundamental propositions in economics: the theory of comparative advantage. Historical evidence supports the assertion that the characteristics of the Japanese economy at the time were compatible with the key assumptions of the neoclassical trade model. Using detailed product-specific data on autarky prices and trade flows, we find that the autarky price value of Japan's trade is negative for each year of the period 1868-75. This confirms the prediction of the theory. I. 'Independently of Deardorff, Dixit and Norman (1980, pp. 94-96) derived the same result. However, their analysis was not formulated and developed as thoroughly as Deardorff's. 2 While under autarky the economy's production point coincides with its consumption point (x" = c"), international trade allows the production point xJ to be distinct from the consumption point c1. In fig. 1, the economy has a comparative advantage in good 2 (or the slope of the production possibility frontier at xf is flatter than at x"). This implies that the economy's trade vector evaluated at autarky prices is negative, or p"T< 0. 3 The insight that prices contain the relevant information about underlying economic fundamentals goes back to the pioneering work of Hayek (1945).

We provide an empirical assessment of the comparative advantage gains from trade argument. We use Japan's nineteenth-century opening up to world commerce as a natural experiment to answer the following counterfactual: "By how much would real income have had to increase in Japan during its final autarky years of 1851-1853 to afford the consumption bundle the economy could have obtained if it were engaged in international trade during that period?" Using detailed historical data on trade flows, autarky prices, and Japan's real GDP, we obtain upper bounds on the gains from trade of about 8 to 9 percent of Japan's GDP.

Many historical accounts have asserted that containerization triggered complementary technological and organizational changes that revolutionized global freight transport. We are the first to suggest an identification strategy for estimating the effects of the container revolution on world trade. Our empirical strategy exploits time and cross-sectional variation in countries' first adoption of container facilities and combines it with product-level variation in containerizability and container usage. Applying our container variables on a large panel of product level trade flows for the period 1962-1990, our estimates suggest economically large concurrent and cumulative effects of containerization and lend support for the view of containerization being a driver of 20 th century economic globalization. JEL classification: F13Keywords: containerization, 20 th century global transportation infrastructure, growth of world trade.

In this paper the two workhorse theories of international trade under imperfect competition -Krugman's taste for variety model and Brander's strategic intraindustry trade model -are integrated into a single analytical framework. A quadratic utility function allows for a nesting of these two theories by postulating a consumer taste for variety over differentiated products, where the extent of product differentiation is linked to the intensity of strategic interaction among firms. The model yields intuitive predictions on the effects of the degree of product differentiation on the volume of trade and on the composition of the gains from trade under imperfect competition. JEL classification: F12Différenciation de produits, concurrence et commerce international. Ce mémoire intègre deux théories connues du commerce international en régime de concurrence imparfaitele modèle du goût pour la variété de Krugman et celui du commerce intra-industrie de Brander -en un seul cadre analytique. Une fonction d'utilité quadratique permet d'encadrer ces deux théories en postulant que le consommateur a un goût pour la variété dans une gamme de produits différenciés où le degré de différenciation est relié à l'intensité de l'interaction stratégique entre les entreprises. Le modèle engendre des prévi-sions quant aux effets du degré de différenciation des produits sur le volume de commerce international et la composition des gains résultant de ce commerce en régime de concurrence imparfaite.

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This paper investigates strategic export intervention in a final-good industry which uses an intermediate good supplied by a foreign monopolist. An export tax-cum-subsidy leads to horizontal and vertical rent extraction. The optimal government intervention in the final-good market is shown to depend on the pricing scheme employed by the intermediate-good producer.

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